“GROWING Violence in Palestine” read our headline on November 2, 1945, a headline that could still apply today. The more things change, the more they stay the same – and the Cyprus Mail has stayed much the same for 67 years now, even as things have changed around it.
Cyprus is now unrecognisable from the quiet, predominantly rural British colony which received our very first issue, though in fact the front page 67 years ago didn’t contain any Cyprus news. Instead we wrote about a British brigadier killed in Java, an attempt to break the British air-speed record (which stood at around 600 miles an hour) and the end of a strike by Manchester dock-workers.
Indeed, that alleged pro-British ‘bias’ has been the paper’s biggest problem in the past six decades – rather unfairly, because the Mail never hesitated to be critical of the British authorities in colonial days, taking them to task in scathing editorials, and covered the EOKA uprising extensively and objectively.
The paper is still aimed partly at British expats, and of course it still features more British news than its Greek-language equivalents, but its focus has always been Cyprus, covering the island longer than any other local paper. Waves of emigration in the 40s and 50s, changing social mores, rising divorce rates, the shift from rural to urban – and of course EOKA, independence, the fighting in 1963, the Turkish invasion, the 2004 referendum, EU accession: all this has been grist to our mill.
And what about the Cyprus Mail website? Well, let’s put it this way: not only was there no World Wide Web in 1945 – there wasn’t even a Tim Berners-Lee (he was born 10 years later), the man widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web! That, at least, is one thing that hasn’t stayed the same in 67 years.
